Bags Eagle Creek Continental Journey approx. 64 liters including daypack

Camera Sony DSC-S70

Computer Sony Vaio PCG-Z505JE

How did you do it?

Digital Camera - First we bought the camera. Any salesman will tell you that you want to buy as many 'megapixels' and 'optical zoom' as you can. Pretty much all the other features are secondary. You only want the megapixels for when you get home and want to print the photos. We took all of our photos at maximum resolution because you never know when you will get that great picture that you will want to print. I then made copies at 640x480 before we selected which would be used on the website.

The DSC-S70 uses a rechargable camcorder-style battery. Usually this was fine except for the Australian outback and the Annapurna trek in Nepal. These were the two times when we were away from electricty, and the ability to re-charge the batteris, for several days at a time. If you thought you would be away from electricity, then you might want a camera that could also use AA batteries. They were even available in the remote villages in Nepal, but expensive.

computer - We brought a computer along with us instead of relying on cybercafe's. I think this was a good choice because writing the website was like writing a paper for school: lots of revisions and editing. By doing this on our computer we didn't need to pay for that time at a cybercafe and we could do it at our leisure in a nice environment. Martha would often write while in our room which would be a lot nicer than in a loud cybercafe with lots of comings and goings. It also meant that I could quickly upload the revisions and then we could continue with our siteseeing.

The other thing I learned part-way through was that I needed a CD-writer. We have 13 CDs of pictures. I would copy them from the camera to the computer almost everyday so that the next day we wouldn't run out of space.

I hope this helps future travellers. Good luck and bon voyage!
- Lon Ficke, 26 Feb 2004

Bag Weights

Date	Country	Lon			Martha
		carry-on (kg)	checked (kg)	total (kg)	carry-on (kg)	checked (kg)	total (kg)
3 Mar	Fiji	5+	10+	~17	5+	10+	~17
25 Mar	New Zealand	?	12.1	~18	?	9.8	~17
9 Jul	Australia	7.5	13.6	21.1	4.5	12.1	16.6
8 Aug	Bali	6.8	12.4	19.2	5.4	10.4	15.8
8 Sep	Thailand	6.7	14.7	21.4	3.6	12.5	16.1
5 Nov	Nepal	4.1	14.1	18.2	4.2	12.5	16.7
8 Dec	Thailand	4.3	12.8	17.1	4.8	12.7	17.5
14 Jan	Singapore	5.2	12.5	17.7	3.8	9.7	13.5
17 Jan	Johannesburg	5.6	13.5	19.1	3.5	11.2	14.7
20 Feb	Vic Falls to Joburg	5.9	13.8	19.7	4.4	11.9	16.3
1 Mar	Spain	8.1	13.5	21.6	7	11.9	18.9
26 Mar	Frankfurt	5.5	12.0	17.5	4.5	10.5	15.0
22 Apr	Washington D.C.	9.5	11.5	21.0	6.0	7.5	13.5